Peter Beverloo

Highlights among this week’s 1,291 commits are quite some Chrome OS touch-related changes, support for relatively positioned table-cells and a wider experiment for background pre-rendering in Chromium.

The Chrome OS team seems to be gearing up for a tablet release. Following someusability-related improvements for touch-based devices, the user-agent string will now indicate the usage of a touch-only device. Furthermore, a brand new New Tab Page landed which provides an iPad-like overview of the installed applications. For all those who want to get a sneak previous of the page, but don’t own a Chrome OS touch-device yet, enable the overview pagina using the “Experimental new tab page” setting on about:flags.

In light of improving specification-compliance, WebKit’s SVG implementation received a rather large commit which implements proper bi-directionality support for SVG Text. Rounding for non-integral percentages has been fixed and exporting WebGL-canvasses to an image, texture or Data URL will now honor the non-premultiplied-alpha attribute.

Relatively positioned table-cells have gained support from the engine and the maxlength attribute for textarea-elements will now take newlines into account. Finally, shadows are now supported for a canvas’ drawImage method and support for GPU-accelerated shadows has been added.

Indeed, with the mania of graphic modernisms, they will ruin the Chrome logo.
There are people who, just to justify a high salary, begins to invent and spoils which took several years to earn a Mark of Prestige…
It would be like changing the logo from Picasa or Google: we look and there is no need of subtitles.
A BRAND takes many years (with luck and in rare cases, a short time) to consolidate. And even today you sell products/articles because of the symbol/mark/badge/logo, rather than by quality. Just let us remind, brand clothing, shoes, watches, wallets, perfumes…

Jon Rimmer

The CSS mixins issue is interesting, because from the discussion in the bug it looks like Google are really pushing this, but Apple aren’t so sure. It seems inevitable that at some point there is going to be a disagreement between Google and Apple over whether to implement a particular feature within Webkit. I wonder what the consequences would be?